Netezza
More info
- Creator
- Foster Hinshaw, Jit Saxena
- Released
- 1999
- Owner
- IBM (from 2010)
- Type
- Data warehouse appliance
The database that wedged a circuit between the disk and the CPU so it wouldn't move data it didn't need.
Founded in 1999 in Massachusetts by Foster Hinshaw and Jit Saxena, it sold not software but a finished box — an appliance shipping hardware, operating system and database as one unit. The trick was placing an FPGA directly in the data stream off the disk, so filtering and projection happened before rows ever reached the CPU. That made large analytic queries fast without hand-tuning.
The idea landed at the right moment, as data warehouses ballooned and Teradata ruled, expensively. IBM bought the company in 2010 for around $1.7 billion and rebadged it PureData. The name lived on; the architecture less so.